Reeling Minnesota

National Review Online

Monday, January 26, 2026

 

Another immigration-enforcement-involved shooting has rocked Minneapolis.

 

On Saturday, federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old man who was out in the streets agitating against an immigration enforcement operation. Although there is much still to learn about the incident, Pretti was armed and got gang-tackled by agents after he tried to assist a woman shoved by an officer. In the midst of the melee — in the very instant after another agent had disarmed Pretti — an officer opened fire.

 

At first blush, the tragedy appears to be in the same category as the fatal shooting of Renee Good, although the details differ and so do the legal questions. Both Good and Alex Pretti engaged in hazardous conduct — accelerating toward an officer in a car and physically interfering with law enforcement officers while armed, respectively — that resulted in officers making split-second decisions to fire in what they presumably believed was self-defense.

 

The beginning of wisdom here would be for opponents of ICE to protest peacefully and not to attempt to harass or impede ICE agents or make them fear for their safety. Elected officials in Minnesota should be urging their citizens to back off and stay home rather than justifying and encouraging the resistance to ICE by direct action in the streets. But, of course, with each incident, their rhetoric gets even more inflamed and irresponsible.

 

As a fundamental matter, the federal government has the obligation to enforce federal immigration law, and city and state officials are out of line in trying to make it a de facto impossibility in their jurisdiction.

 

All that said, the preposterous claims made by Kristi Noem and DHS after these incidents are unworthy of officials holding the public trust and undermine federal credibility. They accused Good of “domestic terrorism.” Almost instantly after this latest shooting, a spokesperson claimed that Pretti (not yet identified at the time) had “approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun.” Video evidence contradicts this account: It appears that Pretti had his legal gun holstered at the beginning of the incident, notwithstanding DHS’s baseless elaboration that this was “an individual [who] wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.”

 

The foolish rhetoric is compounded by irregular investigatory practice. The Justice Department is refusing to investigate Renee Good’s death, as would be standard federal law enforcement practice. Instead, it is investigating Good’s domestic partner for possible ties to radical groups and Minnesota politicians — Governor Tim Walz, along with Jacob Frey and Kaohly Her, the mayors, respectively, of Minneapolis and Saint Paul — on dubious grounds that their reckless speech constitutes actionable incitement.

 

As a result of this, several federal prosecutors have resigned in Minneapolis, including the impressive prosecutor who had been bringing fraud cases for several years, as well as the supervising FBI agent.

 

This time, the departures from usual practice have been starker. At the scene, federal immigration agents attempted to dismiss local police, who were trying to secure the scene and preserve evidence — the required process after a shooting death. While federal agents are, as noted above, authorized to enforce immigration law, the states remain sovereign over such internal affairs as street safety and the enforcement of state law.

 

The Minneapolis police chief properly ordered his officers to remain, but the federal agents appear to have seized as much evidence as they could grab and then left the scene before it could be secured by local police. This portends significant issues of lost and inauthentic evidence in later legal actions. In an extraordinary development on Saturday evening, the state persuaded a federal judge appointed by President Trump to order the federal government not to destroy evidence.

 

A better way forward would be for Attorney General Pam Bondi to appoint a credible, Senate-confirmed district United States attorney with experience leading task forces comprising federal and state investigators. She should announce that the FBI, not the DHS, will take the lead on the federal side. And the chosen U.S. attorney should meet with his Minnesota counterpart to establish a joint investigation, in which the full corpus of evidence is made available to both the FBI and the state police.

 

Even if the leaders of these agencies do not want to collaborate, federal and state police themselves can work together effectively.

 

If anyone wants an off-ramp on the deeper conflict over immigration policy, one compromise would be for Minneapolis to agree to find a way for ICE to apprehend criminal aliens in its jails in exchange for less public ICE presence on the streets.

 

That seems very unlikely, though. We share the administration’s impulse not to let agitators chase federal law enforcement agents from the streets, in a triumph of lawlessness. The administration should be aware, though, that there is a political and social cost to the highly intrusive enforcement operations that it is undertaking, and to its decision not simply to target illegal aliens who have violent criminal records. We believe, too, that the overall illegal population should be drastically diminished, but worksite enforcement that makes it harder to employ illegal labor, including through an E-Verify system, would be more politically palatable and have a significant effect over time.

 

There’s likely going to be more conflict rather than less in Minneapolis, though, and the question seems to be when there will be another tragedy, not if.